The seeker trudges slowly up the mountain through the mists, not sure which path to take. He takes one path only to find that it dead-ends around a few large trees, forcing him to go back and take a different...

How many times have you heard, "living in the moment?" The expression is fashionable now. I hear it everywhere, and see it within or on the back of at least sixty percent of the self-help and psychology books in every...

Hua-tou is a Chinese term that can be translated as “critical phrase”. In Korean, hua-tou is pronounced hwadu and in Japanese as wato. I mention this in case some one has read or heard the term in a Korean...

Students who come to my weekly Dharma talks (or who meet regularly with me in private) are often confronted with my insistence that they view the world more holistically. This is typically triggered by one or more meetings in which...

We cannot discover Chan without the precondition of suffering. Some people think that this is a pessimistic view, or a perverted view, of a practice (meditation) that can be done by anyone, and that suffering is in no way a...

Zen’s hua-tou practice recently seems to be enjoying a renaissance among the small contingent of Zen Buddhists speckling the globe. In part, this may be due to the growing awareness that this was Hsu Yun’s personal favorite Zen practice that...

When we stop to analyze our daily lives, we discover how many of our activities are constructed to assuage a fear of being alone. We wait in lines at restaurants and take several hours to eat a meal that we...

As anyone versed in Chan’s history knows, the hermitic life is a common one passed through by many of China’s most famous Chan teachers. In fact, all mystical traditions commonly find their members, at some time in their life, retreating...

Before we can enter the domain of the spirit, we must exit the domain of self, that is, our ego-self. This requires nothing less than reinventing ourselves - creating a new understanding of who we are - an understanding apart...

We can, each of us, experience Wu! -- that emptiness, that relief -- every time we give up our attachment. When we have a job to do, we simply do it - without grumbling, without daydreaming about all the other...

Within each of us resides an essence that remains hidden - an aspect of ourselves that hides in the unconscious. It hides because of our ego's fear of it. Its aspect is wisdom, understanding, compassion. Do we remain closed within...

The Second Truth is the cause of suffering. It is not life that brings sorrow, but the demands we make on life. . . . Thinking life can make them happy by bringing what they want, people run after satisfaction of their desires . . . [demanding] what experience cannot give: permanent pleasure unmixed with anything unpleasant. But there is no end to such desire; that is the nature of the mind. Suffering because life cannot satisfy selfish desire is like suffering because a banana tree will not bear mangoes.